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05 July 2012

False Teeth and the Foreign Office

To describe something as realist is to acknowledge that it is not the
real thing. We call false teeth realistic, but not the Foreign Office.
If a representation were to be wholly at one with what it depicts, it
would cease to be a representation. A poet who managed to make his or
her words ‘become’ the fruit they describe would be a greengrocer. No
representation, one might say, without separation. Words are certainly
as real as pineapples, but this is precisely the reason they cannot be
pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the
‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind
of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes
details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve
of a moustache, let us say) simply to signal: ‘This is realism.’ In such
art, no waistcoat is colourless, no way of walking is without its
idiosyncrasy, no visage without its memorable features. Realism is
calculated contingency.

The idea itself is as old as the hills (how old are the hills? and which hills, exactly?), but Eagleton expresses it concisely, and his examples made me chuckle.